Hi Kate,

I apologize for taking so long to address the comments you so kindly made about chapter 13. Even though the chapter numbers were changed after I posted the question, and I had meant another chapter instead, your comments were and are still greatly appreciated.

I took so long because, aside from the real world constantly intervening in my efforts to finally put this story into final form, I was busy with other chapters and was very focused there at the time you made your suggestions. I now find myself dealing – and hopefully quite successfully – with chapter 12 again when I remembered your comments about chapter 13, so I went in and removed the use of “subconscious”. You were right of course, it was jarringly out of place, . I also reword the way Lizzy reported Darcy’s words to Holly. I used the phrasing you had quoted on purpose, with the intention of making it crystal clear how Lizzy interpreted his comment, and also to have Holly, within the context of the story, not see something else there that Lizzy had not. However, I think the same thing is easily achieved by quoting his words more directly, and I honestly like it better now. It sounds more natural.

Quite honestly, at that point in the tale we weren’t ready to have it be over by allowing other characters to simply tell them how pig headed and blind they were being, so I was only trying to be extremely careful in that scene, and in fact, took some time to come up with how she would say it to begin with. We wanted Lizzy and Darcy to come to it themselves. Otherwise, Sylwia and I would have been bored and left with a very short and mostly uneventful story where the couple in question would have been portrayed as quite the dolts, while everyone around them was simply both brilliant and clairvoyant, when in actual fact their advices and good intentions actually often got in the couple’s way, lol! But as Sylwia has already said, that was the nature of how we were writing it at the time, and we didn't have control over all of the characters, so we had to be very careful in our wording when it came to things like that, since we didn’t know what the other person might have their character do or say in response.

Hopefully, within a week (give or take a few days), we’ll have both changed chapters updated on this board.

Thanks again for your thoughtful comments. I'll try to be more timely in my future responses!

Laura